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There has been a lot of talk recently about how looking for culture fit can lead to discrimination against candidates and a lack of diversity. It’s important to understand that hiring for culture fit doesn’t mean hiring people who are all the same. The values and attributes that make up an organizational culture can and should be reflected in a richly diverse workforce.

For example, if collaboration is a key organizational value, people who have a genuine, authentic belief in the value of collaborative work will be a stronger culture fit than those who are more comfortable as individual contributors. This doesn’t mean that only people who come from one particular background or have one particular set of experiences are collaborative. A savvy hiring manager knows that a deep-rooted belief in collaboration could just as easily be found in a candidate with a corporate background as a candidate who has worked in the nonprofit sector or a candidate who has spent most of her career in the military.

Here are some questions that will help assess culture fit in an interview:

• What type of culture do you thrive in? (Does the response reflect your organizational culture?) • What values are you drawn to and what’s your ideal workplace? • Why do you want to work here? • How would you describe our culture based on what you’ve seen? Is this something that works for you? • What best practices would you bring with you from another organization? Do you see yourself being able to implement these best practices in our environment? • Tell me about a time when you worked with/for an organization where you felt you were not a strong culture fit. Why was it a bad fit?

You can assess the candidates’ work ethic and style by honing in on the following: whether they succeed in a virtual environment or with everyone in the same space; if they’re more comfortable with a hierarchical organization or can they thrive with a flat structure; and if they tend to collaborate across teams or operate in a more siloed approach.

Finally, expose your candidates to a larger picture of what it would be like to work at your organization. Give him or her a tour of the office and a chance to see how employees at all levels interact with one another at meetings or during lunch. Pay attention to the candidate’s comfort level and gather feedback from staff. The candidate whose behavior and values are consistent with your organization will naturally rise to the top.

If you assess culture fit throughout the recruiting process, you will hire professionals who will flourish in their new roles, drive long-term growth and success for your organization, and ultimately save you time and money.

Katie Bouton
is founder and president of
Koya Leadership Partners
, a national executive search firm committed to recruiting and retaining exceptionally talented and diverse professionals who can make a lasting impact at nonprofits.

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Hi Katie, thank you for sharing your thoughts on this great topic. @companymatch (HRtech company from the Netherlands) we do exactly this, looking to match jobseekers / candidates based on cultural fit before they even apply for a job. We assess cultural fit (based on shared values, drivers and motivators) for over 300 companies in Europe, varying from Philips to Siemens. Our match algorithm allows anonymous jobseekers to match with the employer brands involved via our CompanyMatch widget which is embedded in the career site or Facebook. Via our CompanyMatch api we allow jobseekers to send along their CompanyMatch from within the application form. Directly into the ATS (recruitment software). This helps the recruiter to get in a better quality of hire and to start conversation based on these shared values and beliefs in the job interview. Addressing and assessing cultural fit is the crucial part of enjoying a successful hiring process. Best regards, Bjorn

We hope our concept of the next step, the multi-product work center—in a sense, the ultimate customer orientation for processing services—will answer this problem. The multiproduct work center will be geared to a set of customers, or even, if volume warrants, to a single customer, but it will handle
all
the financial transaction services those customers use or require.

The actual configuration of the work center is still being planned, but an overall profile can be described. There exists today, for example, a services management center (SMC) for Swiss banks. It handles all the transactions those important correspondent relationships require. The people who staff the center are becoming expert in the “style” of banking these customers practice; they are getting to know the personnel, procedures, and processes of the Swiss banks so they can respond to and anticipate customer needs.

Another services management center has been established for customers in the Middle East/North Africa region. We call it the “MENA SMC.” It has been extremely innovative—and highly successful—in designing special procedures and new products to serve the unique needs of customers in this region of the world.

Both the Swiss SMC and the MENA SMC serve as stylistic prototypes for the multiproduct work center to come. What is required now is the technological integration of functional capabilities, the development and implementation of appropriate systems to handle and deliver the full profile of transaction services for the various customer segments, and the development of solid training programs to create the multiproduct work center professional. None of these elements is that far from being realized.

In sum, then, we have made and intend to make more significant changes. Yet more important than the scale of the changes is their direction. We are using technology to create an environment in which services are tailored to customer needs and efficiently delivered by a professional work force—that is the real message of our actions.

Citibank’s letter of credit operation today is, in our opinion, a model of financial transaction services processing. In making our back office a mirror image of our front office, we are delivering the personalized service of the “old days” via the sophisticated technology and management thinking of today.

Creating educated automatons is unacceptable if you view people as adults who can develop in a number of directions—as human beings with enormous potential. Given this view, which I hold strongly, it is cruel to the individuals and wasteful to society to expect people to spend more than half their waking hours each day without stimulus of any sort, simply acting as efficient machine-tenders.
1

Mr. Matteis
is a senior vice president of Citibank. He is responsible for developing and managing a network of communications and computing capabilities to support that institution’s worldwide financial services business.

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I hate that, now I have 4 properties in search console for just one website.

Governor Brainard concluded that “there is no compelling demonstrated need for a Fed-issued digital currency,” adding that “most consumers and businesses in the U.S. already make retail payments electronically using debit and credit cards, payment applications, and the automated clearinghouse network.”

What is your opinion on central bank-issued cryptocurrencies? Tell us in the comments section below!

Samuel Haig is a journalist and entrepreneur who has been completely obsessed with bitcoin and cryptocurrency since 2012. Samuel lives in Tasmania, Australia, where he attended the University of Tasmania and majored in Political Science, and Journalism, Media Communications. Samuel has written about the dialectics of decentralization, and is also a musician and kangaroo riding enthusiast.

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